Weekly Status Report, W29/2009

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 29/2009 (July 13 - 19, 2009):

• Build System and Release Harness:
  After some poking of release drivers, I could land the Mac unpacking fix on 1.9.1 so that L10n repackaging of Mac comm-1.9.1 nightlies and 2.0b1 builds could work. The botched checkin of the equivalent for release tools was fixed as well, so now we should be able to reliably unpack DMGs everywhere (would have been easier if Apple wouldn't create commandline tools that act asynchronously).
  We found a good solution for automatically removing debug UI from beta and final releases and I landed that also in time for Beta 1.
  When starting to run release automation I found out about a version bump problem with the release tools and created a patch to handle our special case.
• Release Process:
  The really big thing this week was working on the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release itself. The tracking bug and the Build Notes have a good amount of the story of how it went. I did run into a few small issues, including one obscure error that looks like a machine issue with one VM, but the release automation work done in the last weeks turned out to have been almost perfect, as that part performed like a charm. We have builds for Windows, Linux and Mac in 17 languages now, as well as partial and complete updates (for US English, we didn't have any localized versions before) and we are all set for release from that point of view.
• SeaMonkey Project Website:
  I needed to come up with some new things for the 2.0 Beta 1 download page, as this is the first time we ship localized builds, and while I was at that, I included some small style improvements to the overall site, like highlighting headers when they are direct targets in the called URL.
• SeaMonkey L10n:
  Some significant work went into the opt-in process for the beta, where I took the time to do a fast productization review of all opted in revisions, which proved to be interesting as I also got to see all the websites of those locales that use custom homepages or bookmarks. We ended up with 15 locales opting in, one of which (hu) has over 450 obsolete strings which I disliked for releasing as official, but the others looked just good. One (pt-PT) had a complete and looking-good localization but failed to opt in. Because of that, we'll release the beta in 15 official languages (including en-US) and offer hu and pt-PT as "unofficial" one with a note that they didn't fully meet quality and formal requirements for official builds at this time.
• Various Discussions:
  Various version changes on websites and tools to support 2.0b2pre and 2.1a1pre nightlies, landing support for various shortcut keys in download manager, progress window accessibility, tabmail, getting old "-tbox" slaves into new buildbot pools, mac theme work, real and unreal FF 3.5 (Gecko 1.9.1) exploit reports, Gecko/platform 1.9.2 planning and SeaMonkey/Thunderbird, etc.

Apart from one strange issue that appears to be related to a single VM in our build machine pool, creation of the SeaMonkey 2.0 Beta 1 release went really smoothly, and I'm really excited to see this version hit the public in 15+2 languages (see above), probably today or tonight. Even thought there are 20 language packs available to be used for 1.1.17, we never had any release that had official localized builds, and never had any version that had fully builds available in such a number of languages right from the start. We really can be proud of starting the beta phase of SeaMonkey 2.0 with that achievement, even though the collection of languages shows pretty much how Europe-centric our project is - I hope more parts of the world will join in for the next beta and for the stable releases.
In addition to that localization story, the first Beta offers the same Gecko and platform as Firefox 3.5.1, the completely reworked download manager, feed preview including better feed subscription, customizable mail toolbar, mail archiving and many more features and fixes in addition to all the good things we already had in the alphas - about 130 fixes were done just in SeaMonkey-specific code since Alpha 3, many more come from mail/news code shared with Thunderbird 3 Beta 3 and the Gecko/platform code we additionally share with Firefox 3.5.1.

I hope this beta release will be remarkable not just for our team, but also for all of you out there!